


In what furnace was thy brain?

by a_walking_shadow



Series: burning bright [5]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Dr Nyarlathotep, Episode: s04e13 Journey's End, Gen, The Tenth Doctor is not a nice person, references to Faction Paradox et al
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-04
Updated: 2019-08-04
Packaged: 2020-07-30 19:24:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20102362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_walking_shadow/pseuds/a_walking_shadow
Summary: Ey isn't a Time Lord, and ey isn't a human, not anymore. The DoctorDonna are something more, something new-but ey could only ever be one or the other, and the choice isn't even up to em.





	In what furnace was thy brain?

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [From the Egg](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18968821) by [Kuroshi44](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kuroshi44/pseuds/Kuroshi44). 

> Hello! As you've probably guessed from the summary, the DoctorDonna ends up using neopronouns, by the time ey actually work out a bit of an identity. I've never actually used them before, so if it looks like I've gotten anything wrong, PLEASE let me know about it. 
> 
> Otherwise, this is right up there in terms of being the most headache-inducing thing I've written- eldritch entities don't like English grammar very much. Comments and constructive criticism would be appreciated, especially if there's anything unclear. Or just come say hi, I promise I'm friendly :) 
> 
> Final point: this both inspired Kuroshi44's work, and was inspired by it, because I've been plotting ideas for ages and she beat me to writing hers down. Go read it, I swear it's a lot more cheerful than my take on this!

Once upon a time [that’s a cliché way to start a story, don’t you think, but what is a story if not a collection of clichés and archetypes thrown together into some semblance of order for a linear mind], there was a little girl called Donna Noble. And, as little girls are wont to do sometimes, she got lost.

It isn’t much of a story, all in all. A little girl wandered away from her father, too caught up in watching something- she no longer remembers what- and then, bam! Parents gone. Just like that. She panicked a bit, ran around a bit, then her dad found her again and bought her an ice cream and they went home and she promised not to run off again, a promise which lasted all the way until the following Tuesday when Michael from down the road tried to steal her new ball, and she went to give him what for. And maybe retrieve the ball. But mainly give him what for. (but that’s another story entirely.)

The thing which is important here: the message behind the story, the parable, if you will, for all that this isn’t a particularly important sequence of events to anyone but her, is not- as one may suspect- _don’t wander off_. All in all, the wandering bit didn’t end too badly.

It’s more about what happened when she was trying to find her way back, pushing through crowds of people- legs, really, not enough actual “person” to make sense of any of them as anything other than _Not Dad_\- and catching fragments of conversations, none of which made sense. They probably weren’t foreign languages, but they might as well have been, for all that young Donna Noble had been able to make sense of them. The only thing which made sense was that nothing around her was what it was supposed to be, and she was lost and alone and she didn’t know how to find her way home.

It’s the closest thing Donna can remember to what’s going on right now, and, as far as comparisons go, it’s _woeful_.

‘Huh’, Donna had thought, when she realised she wasn’t the only one inside her head. ‘Right then.’

After that, things got complicated.

There is still, buried somewhere under an impossible mountain of new senses and information and understanding, a small kernel of a person who knows that she is Donna, the best temp in Chiswick. She is currently conducting an inner monologue composed entirely of sarcastic comments and plans for how to catalogue this mess, partly because someone needs to do it and it sure as hell isn’t going to be the other idiot, and partly because doing that means she doesn’t have to think about the fact that she isn’t alone in her head.

“The other idiot”, in this case, isn’t so much a person as a force of nature, and he’s tearing through her nicely organised mind like a tornado, tossing her memories skywards (there’s no sky, but if we’re assigning nouns we might as well assign adjectives too). And he’s laughing in utter ecstasy, which on one hand is quite rude but on the other she guesses he hasn’t ever inhabited a human mind before, so maybe he has a point.

She doesn’t laugh, because oi, spaceman, that’s my mind you’re using as kindling, have some respect, but she does wander down to his level to see what’s going on. (Again, it’s not like this place has anything so simple as directions, at least not ones that can be expressed in a language built by the telepathically-blind. But if we’re telling this story we might as well try.)

He’s dancing around in her memories of Pompeii, seemingly content for now to let his own fires mingle with those of the Pyroviles, and since it seems a lot less destructive to her psyche as a whole than whatever the hell was happening earlier, she’s content to let him do it.

Oh, there’s something-

Daleks. Right. She should probably do something about that-

-and then she’s watching herself press a button on the panel and nothing changes and she presses a button on the panel and nothing changes and she presses a button on a panel and they all die and she goes to press a button and the dalek shoots her and she presses a button on the panel and nothing changes and she presses a button on the panel and nothing changes and she presses a button on the panel and the system shuts down-

So she presses a button on the panel and the system shuts down.

‘How many of those happened?’ she asks the other guy, but as soon as she’d thought the word “daleks” his nicely contained sparks had erupted into a firestorm, and he doesn’t seem to be paying her any attention.

‘Oi! Spaceman!’

He still doesn’t look, and is instead very focused on creating a bio-electric dampening field with a retrograde field arc inversion-

Okay, how does she even know what that is?

No, better question. How is he the one in control of her actions?

It takes both an eternity and no time at all to get the answers for that. Time doesn’t function, here- or rather, she’s aware of it, painfully aware of the constant tick and tock of her life draining away, she could count out every oscillation of an atom of caesium-133 if she wanted to, she could give you an estimate of how long she has left to within a fraction of one of those oscillations (and she does know, for all she tries to ignore it, and it’s far too soon). But her thoughts are faster, and soon enough (nothing is soon enough, not when she can feel Time slipping through her fingers, feel Death looming over her shoulder) she’s formatted her questions into an email complete with subject line and urgent marker and pinged them in his direction.

(sue her. She spent a long time as a temp, okay? And she knows exactly how to get someone’s attention in the most irritating way possible.)

He ignores the first one, so she sends it again, and again, and again, in nice mathematical sequences until he’s drowning in a tide of politely worded memos and far too occupied to do anything other than grumble at them. _I can think of ideas you two couldn’t dream of in a million years_. Yeah, that might refer to the dalek kill switch. It might also refer to the idea of stopping someone with piles of paperwork. Hundred words per minute, indeed.

And then he _answers_.

Well.

Maybe not him, exactly. It was never a him, wasn’t a _him_ even before “he” arrived here, silly little gender-based pronouns to describe a force of (un)nature were never enough, but he was her spaceman, her Martian Boy, and it’s not like the English language was ever built to contain him anyway, so “him” it is.

And maybe not answers, exactly, because you can’t really answer yourself, and this was never _him_, was it?

Oh, sure, there was something of the being known as “The Doctor” in that mess, an echo of an echo from another dimension entirely, enough of a copy that shethey comes closer to being The Doctor than anyone else, but it’s not enough. It’s never going to be enough.

It’s too much to process. Too much for anyone other than a full Time Lord to process, and who knows how much of themselves they lost in order to do it. It’s too much for her- for them, _well, one of us has to go_-

Donna can feel herself- themselves- glitching, looping and stuttering over the same moment again and again and againandagainandagainandagainand-

‘because there can’t be’, she says, because it’s true, but at least let _herthem_ pick which one survives.

Doctor, please, DonnaandnotquiteDoctor says, out loud. Please, no. _I’m like you_, she doesn’t say verbally, but she tries to show him, a few steps sideways and a moment in the future, and she glitches, on this level of reality, but she can exist in it, kind of, which is more than anyone else. Look, mum, no hands! I’m doing it I’m doing it I’m doingdoingdoingdoing- well, I’m sure we can learn, if you let us, please don’t kill me PLEASE-

She’s burning up, on the physical level, and it _hurtshurtshurtshurtsHURTS_ but they can continue, can’t she, this is physical death not metaphorical-conceptual. (Donna Noble doesn’t understand the difference. DoctorDonna understands it all too well.)

It’s a choice, non-zero sum trolley problem, DoctorDonna the concept or Donna the human being, one lives one dies and Donna- Donna wants to go, she wants to be part of something bigger. She’s human, not even posthuman, not supposed to be able to do this, but for what it’s worth she throws herself into the twisting, broken lines of code that writhe in agony at her all-too-physical presence but try and embrace it anyway. She’s doing it, tiny little human Donna, she’s becoming unreal-

I am so sorry, he says, to Donna Noble. He doesn’t talk to the DoctorDonna because he’s not sorry to em, really, ey are too similar and he’s already proved once today what he thinks of people like him. Too dangerous to be left on his own. And ey can’t be controlled, not by him and not by anyone, not if they survive and Donna dies, because you can’t stop an idea. Easier for him to find someone else, some other human to <strike>turn into a weapon</strike> keep him in line, send Donna back to the humdrum of everyday life and pretend he did a Good Thing.

DoctorDonna is winning, right now, with Donna’s blessing, but then he takes her shoulders and she’s shaking and crying and a few dimensions to the left an idea of travel and freedom and Felspoon and planet of the hats! is writhing in the grip of a tornado, and the wind isn’t gentle, not at all, it cuts like knives and ey are fraying at the edges.

The Doctor (what a misleading name, doctor, healer, when all he’s doing is killing her) takes the battle and he flips it, _reverses the polarity of the neutron flow that does nothing, physically, but it sounds important and here it’s the idea that carries weight not the actual action_\- a concept to defeat a concept, and oh isn’t that nice ey are something to be defeated because ey aren’t his friend Donna, they’re <strike>too similar to him to be allowed to live </strike>_oi, spaceman, what makes you think you’re so special? Why do you think you can- _

Nononononopleasenononononononoiwontforgetiwontforgetiwontforget-

iwontforget

iwont

i

i

i

Donna Noble isn’t exactly happy with her life, but it isn’t like she’ll find anything better.

There’s nothing else out there, she says, whenever her friends talk about aliens or spaceships or planets moving. No point in daydreaming about escaping this place, this life. It’s not like there’s anywhere else to go.

She can’t even entertain the idea.


End file.
